Personal experience with you. I know many of you are experts, arms control specialists. And i am sure you are quite wellinformed and knowledgeable of all kinds of human conditions, including the human consequences of nuclear weapons. But i thought i would offer my firsthand and personal experience. In 1945, i was a 13yearold grade 8 student in the girls school. On that very day, i was at the army headquarters. A group of about 30 girls had been recruited to do decoding work of topsecret information. Can you imagine . Such andld girls doing important thing . That shows how desperate japan was. I met the girls at the station at 8 00, before 8 00. At 8 00, at the military headquarters, which was 1. 8 kilometers from ground zero. I was on the second floor and started the morning assembly. They gave us a pep talk. This is the day to start proving your patriotism for the emperor. That sort of thing. We said, yes, sir, we will do our best. When we said that, i saw the bluishwhite flash in the window. I had the sensation of floating up in the air. When i regained consciousness in the total silence and darkness, i could not move my body. I knew i was faced with death. Then i started hearing whispering voices of the girls around me. God help me, mother help me. I knew i was surrounded by them, although i could not see anybody in the darkness. Then, suddenly, strong male voices as well. Do not give up. I am trying to free you. He kept shaking my Left Shoulder from behind. He pushed me. Kicking, kept pushing. Said, you will see the sun coming through the opening. Get out that way. Crawl as quickly as possible. By the time i came out of the building, it was on fire. That meant about 30 other girls who were with me were burned to death. Two other girls managed to come out. With me. The three of us looked around. Although that happened in the morning, it was very dark. Dark like twilight. I started seeing objects approaching me. They happened to be streams of human beings, slowly shuffling from the center part of the city. They did not look like human beings. Their hair was standing straight up, burned and blackened and bleeding. Parts of the body were missing. The skin and flesh were hanging. Hanging from their bones. Some were carrying their own eyeballs, hanging from the eye socket. As they collapsed, their stomachs burst open with intestines stretching out. Youhe soldiers said, girls join the procession to the nearby hills. That is what we did, by carefully stepping over the dead bodies, injured bodies. What a strange situation. Nobody was running and screaming for help. They did not have that kind of strength left. They were simply whispering, water, please. Everybody was asking for water. We girls were relatively lightly injured. By the time we got to the hillside, we went to the nearby stream and washed off the blood and dirt and took off the soaked them in the holdm and dashed back to them over the mouths of the dying people. The place we escaped to had a military training ground, huge place, about the size of two football fields. The place was packed with the dead and dying. We wanted to help, but everybody wanted the water. There were no cups and no buckets to carry the water. That is why we had the primitive way. That is all we could do. I looked around to see if there were any doctors and nurses. But i saw none of them in that huge place. That meant tens of thousands of people in that place without medication, no medical attention, medication, ointment. Nothing was provided for them, just a few drops of water. Clothing. Et that was the level of socalled rescue operations. Now, we kept ourselves busy all day doing that. Of course, all the doctors and nurses were killed, too. Just a small percentage of medical professionals survived, but they were serving people somewhere else, not where i was. When the darkness fell, we three girls, together with hundreds of other people who escaped, we just sat on the hillside. And all night, we watched the empire city burn. Just feeling numbed from the massive scale of death and suffering we had witnessed. I was not responding appropriately. Emotionally. Something happened to my psyche. There is talk of psychic closing off in a situation like that. The sensation of being mortal takes place automatically. I am glad of that explanation. If we responded emotionally to every horrific sight i witnessed, i could not have survived. That is the end of that very day. Other people can talk about being near the rivers, the rivers full of floating dead bodies and so on. But i did not see the river that day. In my family, my friends, how they lost their lives. That will give you how the bomb affected human beings. I talked about 30 girls who were with me. But the rest of the students were at the city center. The city was trying to establish names to be prepared for the air raid. All the grade 7 and 8 students wereall the high schools recruited and brought to the center of the city. They were providing manual labor. Now, they were in the center, right below the detonation of the bomb, so they are the ones simply vaporized, melted, and carbonized. My sisterinlaw was a student, one of the teachers supervising students. We tried to locate her, but we have never done so. On paper, she is still missing. But together with thousands of others, i understand there were several thousand students, 7000 or 8000 or so, they simply disappeared from the face of the earth. The temperature of the heat, i understand, was about 4000 degrees celsius. Another story i can tell is about my sister and her 4yearold child who came back the night before to visit us. Early in the morning, they were walking over the bridge to the medical clinic, and both of them were burned beyond recognition. By the time i saw them the next day, their bodies were swollen two or three times larger than normal. They kept begging for water. When they died, a soldier dug a threwthrew the bodies, gasoline, threw a lighted match. They kept turning the bodies. The stomach is not quite burned yet. Turn it. I was a young girl. There i was, emotionlessly watching. That memory troubled me for many years. What kind of human being am i . My dear sister being treated like an animal or insect. There was no Human Dignity associated with that kind of cremation. The fact i did not even shed tears, that troubled me for many years. Later year, i started learning how human beings behave in odd situations. Was a big help. I could forgive myself after learning how our psyche automatically functions in situations like that. It is the image of this 4yearold child which is burned in my retinas. It is always there. That image is the driving force for my activism. Alluse he came to represent the innocent children of the World Without understanding what was happening to him. So he is a special being, a special memory. If he is alive, he is 75 today. It is a shocking thought. Regardless of passage of time, he is still a 4yearold child, guiding me. It was interesting. Mr. Obama made a lot of references about children. How we need to protect each one of them. I was weeping. I could not help it. Let me tell you another example of how atomic bombs affect the human being. We rejoiced to hear my favorite uncle and aunt survived. They were ok. They did not have any visible signs of injury. Then several days later, we started hearing a different story. They got sick. Very sick. So, after my sister and nephew died, my parents went over to my uncles place. Them. D looking after their bodies started showing purple spots all over the body. According to my mother, who cared for them until their death, their internal organs seemed to be rotting. Assolving, coming out as death. Lood liquid until